Never for the sake of peace and quiet deny your own experience. Dag Hammarskjold.

Each of us has a set of values and a belief system by which we do our best to live our lives. It’s not always easy and sometimes necessitates putting a little water in our wine.

Life being what it is, though, from time to time you will come up against a red line issue that will test these values. It might be at work or in a personal relationship but there will be something or someone with who challenges your view or take on life – and you have to take a stand.

Often it is not pleasant but if it is a red line issue, you have to dig in and stand up for you – even when your courage is thin.

It’s one thing to stand up to your enemies. It’s quite another to stand up to your friends and family.

The future depends on what we do today. Mahatma Gandhi

Globalization and the IT revolution have changed everything.

Time and distance have collapsed. The consumers’ thirst for what’s new is insatiable. Markets are changing faster than ever. The challenges are enormous. The question is how best to compete.

As you ponder your future, searching for answers and the right direction, here are five questions to consider:

1. How strategic is your thinking?
2. How adept are you at changing?
3. Are you making the best use of the new social media tools for your business?
4. How broad is your world view?
5. What is the one, most significant action you need to take to move your business forward?

The future is arriving, ready or not. Getting it right isn’t easy but hey, who said it was going to easy?

Life is all memory, except for the present moment that goes by so quick you hardly catch it going. From the play, The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore by Tennessee Williams.

The other day I received an amazing email – one that stopped me in my tracks and cut right through the everyday daily noise and empty distractions with which we all deal.

It was a note from an old friend who had lived on the same street as me and attended the same high school – when I was in my early teens and from whom I had not heard a single word since I moved away – fifty years ago.

Like me, he, too, had eventually moved along on his life’s path, living, working,lloving, fixed on a set of conceived and preconceived goals. Then, for some reason, at this juncture, he penned a few brief lines, wondering what was going on in my life. Where was I, he wondered and what was I was up to?

Imagine, for moment, an old school friend of yours contacting you, out of the blue, after all those years and all the living you both had done. What would you say? Where would you even begin to begin? Really.

How would I begin, I thought? The answer could well fill a book. Maybe it will. While his journey and mine are hopefully far from over, I couldn’t help but think of the old axiom that life isn’t about the end game or meeting the goals, it’s about whom you become on the way to meeting them.

It’s at a time like this that you are reminded of how true that is.

Today’s economy is global, interconnected and interdependent.

It has created a need for a new business model that demands we work in a new space – not reliant only on our linear, left brain side nor with an over emphasis on the creative right brain side, but in using both. That means listening to our intuition but then taking that information and filtering it through our minds.

That’s where you are at your best – following your hunches, using your smarts and your experience to bring your work to successful fruition.

To say nothing of keeping a handle on all the craziness that is going on.

It’s a juggling act, but here are three tips to help you on your path:

1. Have the courage to think outside the proverbial box. That’s where the status quo isn’t.

2. Build on a bigger future even though you can’t always see it.

3. Play the game of life with joy.

When you approach life as an adventure and a blessing you open up your mind to creative options.

Besides, where is it written that you can’t enjoy what you’re doing?

It’s all about continuous learning and personal growth.

Wonderful things happen, life sparkles when you are open to new possibilities, working in the space between the two magic spheres.

The Zen Master poured his visitor’s teacup full, and then kept pouring.

The visitor watched until he could no longer restrain himself:

“It is over full,” he said. “No more will go in.”

“Like this cup,” replied the Zen Master, “You are full of your own opinions and assumptions. How can you learn truth until you first empty your cup?”

Zen Koans are insightful stories designed to defy rational analysis but provide an ‘Aha’ moment when the reader intuitively gets it.

The above story is one of my favourites because, to me at least, it perfectly illustrates how – when we are endlessly, fruitlessly searching for an answer to one issue or another – we forget one of life’s lessons unwritten rules:

You can’t solve an intractable problem with the same mind that created it.

Sometimes you need a fresh pair of eyes.